What feeling left behind
Romanticism never ended so much as it dispersed, because a temperament cannot disband. It had no club to dissolve. Its painters simply died (Goya in 1828, Géricault young in 1824, Friedrich in 1840, Constable in 1837, Turner in 1851, Delacroix last of all in 1863) and its ideas leaked into everything that came after. Three of those streams ran furthest.
The first stream is landscape. Constable’s and Turner’s loose, weather-driven, light- chasing way of painting the outdoors fed straight into the Barbizon painters (a group who went to the French countryside to paint nature from life) and from there into Impressionism, the movement that would build its whole project on putting real light on canvas. When Monet painted a sunrise as a smear of orange over gray water, he was finishing something Turner had started. The second stream is the exotic: Delacroix’s Morocco pictures seeded the long nineteenth-century vogue for Orientalism, beautiful, problematic, and everywhere by mid-century.
The third stream is the largest, and it is really the whole modern idea of art. Romanticism is the moment European painting decided that feeling is a legitimate subject, that the brushstroke is allowed to show, that color can outrank line, and that a single artist’s private vision is worth a wall. Every one of those propositions had been a heresy under David. Within a century they were simply what painting was. The quarrel Romanticism picked with Neoclassicism (feeling against reason, color against line, the individual against the order) turned out to be the hinge the rest of the nineteenth century swung on, and a fair amount of the twentieth.
The strange thing, looking back, is that it was won by a movement that never existed. There was no Romantic manifesto, because there was no Romantic movement to sign one, just painters in Madrid, Paris, London, and Dresden who mostly never met and shared a mood instead of a program. The nearest thing to a creed came secondhand, from the writers and critics: Wordsworth defining poetry as the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings, Friedrich telling painters to shut the bodily eye and paint what they saw within, Delacroix arguing for color in the privacy of his journal, and the poet Charles Baudelaire pinning it down a generation later, that Romanticism lived “neither in choice of subjects, nor in exact truth, but in a way of feeling.” No headquarters, no rulebook, no leader. A firing squad, a raft, a barricade, a storm, and a lone man before the fog. A temperament, and it reset the whole course of European painting.